This article was written by Zayna Allen a journalist and content creator formerly of 21Ninety. You can find her on Instagram @zaynathebrand or by supporting her Substack!

When journalism’s demise makes its way to the silver screen, that’s how you know we’re in some deep dog shit as a society. *Spoilers ahead*

You’re sitting at a table surrounded by your colleagues, whom you’ve been in the trenches with, and in the middle of an awards ceremony celebrating your work, everyone at the table gets a text breaking the news that you’ve all been let go.

That’s how The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens. There was no space for me to enjoy a fun opening scene. A mere 10 minutes in, I found myself looking in a mirror. Audiences may see that scene as a fictional idea formed in one of the writer’s heads for entertainment purposes. But it was actually the reality that many of my colleagues in this industry and I have experienced firsthand.

For the sake of catching you all up on TDWP2: Andy Sachs is now an award-winning investigative journalist at the top of her craft. She’s exactly where she worked so hard to be. However, in the middle of accepting recognition for that very work, her entire newsroom is laid off by text message. The company decides that the magazine that told real stories and gave people a voice is no longer worth the investment.

I’m (the Black) Andy Sachs, and I just got my text — no Love Island.

Alexa, Play “End of the Road”

If you’ve been following me and my work for a minute, you probably already know that 21Ninety (a lifestyle women’s outlet under the Blavity umbrella) officially shut down, and my role as associate editor is no more. I am now part of what has become an alarmingly large and growing group of journalists who’ve been pushed out of an industry that increasingly seems not to want us. Or more specifically, doesn’t want to pay for us anymore.

I navigated my entire late twenties at 21Ninety. I grew into a journalist there. I learned what my voice was for, who I was writing to, and why any of it mattered. The stories I covered were selfishly questions I had about my own Black womanhood, and I got to report my way to the answers. Now I’m entering my thirties, and this chapter has closed. It’s the season finale of the girl I was.

While I’m at peace with that chapter of my life closing, I can’t help but harp on the idea that this is larger than just little old me losing my job, and more about society’s dismantlement of the stories of our people. The Devil Wears Prada 2 laid it all out like a beautifully tailored indictment that most people walking into that theater might not have fully felt. But I did. I felt that shit in my chest, and I’m sure many journalists around the world share that heavy feeling with me.

The Magazine Is the Metaphor

The plot of the sequel centers on Runway Magazine’s fight for survival. The publication’s chairman dies, and his profit-obsessed son swoops in looking to gut the entire establishment. He slashes budgets, cuts staff, and is willing to sell the whole thing off if the numbers don’t make sense. For the first time, Miranda Priestly is vulnerable. Everything she built, the craft, the intentionality, the idea that fashion matters (how can we forget the ICONIC cerulean monologue), is suddenly being weighed against page views and ad revenue and what will get the most clicks with the least investment.

Sounds oddly familiar…

The film shows how the magazine has changed over the decades. Everything is digital, and the quality of articles has dropped because the focus has shifted to catering trends. The focus now is short attention spans, viral hits, and content built for the scroll. In trying to chase the algorithm, Runway Magazine has become a shell of what it was.

Just like Runway Magazine, the media industry has too become a shell of what it once was. Many think it’s solely due to budget cuts, but the low funding is an evident values problem. Depth is less valuable than volume, nuance is less shareable than noise, and the stories that take months to report and years to understand don’t deserve the same real estate as something that racks up views in 48 hours. We are in the era of fast-fashion journalism, but neither Shein nor Fashion Nova’s rise fully captures this downfall.

The Numbers Don’t Lie, Even When the Headlines Bury Them

Let me give you a little context, because I want you to understand that this isn’t just me being dramatic about losing my job.

In 2025 alone, it was reported that over 17,000 jobs were cut across television, film, broadcast, news, and streaming, marking an 18% increase from the year before. Since 2018, the media industry has averaged more than 14,000 job cuts per year. We are watching an industry dissolve in real time.

Of course, within those numbers, Black journalists bear a disproportionate weight of this collapse.

A Pew Research survey found that Black journalists make up only 6% of the U.S. newsroom workforce. Recent layoffs have shrunk that already-thin slice even further. NBC disbanded the entire teams behind NBC BLK, NBC Latino, NBC Asian America, and NBC Out. Over 150 employees gone, including Curtis Bunn, the only reporter at NBC BLK. CBS laid off four producers of color while their white colleagues were reassigned. Teen Vogue was folded into Vogue, leaving Kaitlyn McNab and Aiyana Ishmael, the only two Black editors on staff there, without a job.

Of the 169 race, diversity, and equality journalism roles that existed between 2020 and late 2024, a third are now gone. A third of the jobs created in the aftermath of a national racial reckoning, jobs that were meant to ensure our stories got told, have already been eliminated.

A lot of these cuts are arriving under the banner of “business decisions,” and although many of us may have been born at night, we sure as hell weren’t born last night.

The Notion of “Frivolous” Media

The aforementioned cerulean monologue from the first Devil Wears Prada film is the thesis of both movies. Miranda finds herself explaining to Andy that the “lumpy blue sweater” she’s wearing didn’t just materialize, yet was the result of years of decisions made by designers, editors, and tastemakers that trickled down through the culture until it landed in a bin at some discount retailer.

Culture is not decoration. Fashion, entertainment, journalism, art, etc, have told the stories of our people for centuries. When we allow them to be gutted in the name of efficiency, sure, companies may save a little bread, but ultimately, we lose the infrastructure of our own shared meaning.

And unfortunately, many outlets classify

Black media like Ebony, Jet, The Source, Essence, BET (in its original form), The Root, and my beloved 21Ninety have always been more than entertainment. They have been a means of documentation, a means of preservation. These were the places where we got to see ourselves fully. A young Black woman in her twenties could read a story in any of these platforms about navigating her womanhood and feel less alone.

In my time working at another outlet geared towards a Black audience (who shall remain nameless until the NDA is lifted), the higher-ups sent an email to the entire company explaining that, effective immediately, there would be a halt on “non-urgent” payments. They then listed which payments would fall under “non-urgent,” including production and editorial work. Video production and editorial teams were predominantly made up of freelancers, and they were not paid on time after that email.

These workers and these spaces are not frivolous or “non-urgent.” In fact, they are probably more urgent now than they have ever been and they are disappearing.

The political landscape we’re in right now is actively accelerating that disappearance. The rollback of DEI initiatives, which extends to corporate newsrooms, federal agencies, and universities, isn’t just about policy or creating “equal opportunity for all.” It is a clear indicator of whose stories are considered worth investing in. When the FCC starts investigating networks for their diversity programs, when companies race to dismantle their equity commitments before they get scrutinized, the very loud message is that certain stories, certain voices, certain communities are optional line items.

We are not expendable.

One Thing ‘Bout History? It’ll Repeat Itself

The Harlem Renaissance, which became a world-shifting explosion of Black art, literature, music, journalism, and intellectual life, happened at the exact same time as the Great Depression.

While the economy was collapsing around them, while resources were being stripped and institutions were failing and the future looked genuinely uncertain, Black creatives produced some of the most enduring work this country has ever seen. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, The Crisis magazine.

A community that had every reason to go quiet instead got louder. They expanded instead of contracting and documented instead of disappearing. I don’t think that was a coincidence. That’s what happens when you are a people who have always had to create outside of the systems that weren’t built for you. When the institution stops making space, the community makes its own.

We may be approaching something that looks and feels a lot like that moment again. Economists have been ringing alarm bells about where this country is headed financially, and the creative industry is already absorbing the early shocks. But if the Harlem Renaissance has anything to teach us, it’s that Black creativity does not require permission to flourish, and it sure as hell doesn’t need a company or an algorithm’s approval. It requires people who have something to say and an audience that needs to hear it.

We have both of those things. We’ve always had both of those things.

Although I feel like I’m watching Thanos snapping his fingers and watching the industry dissolve, I’m also watching something start to stir. I see mutuals with independent newsletters, community-funded journalism, podcasts, Substacks (hi, it’s me), and creators who are done waiting for a seat at a table that keeps shrinking.

Maybe that’s the silver lining nobody’s saying out loud. The demolition of the old infrastructure might be the very thing that forces us to build something that actually belongs to us.

Advocacy, Advocacy, and More Advocacy

One of the things that hit me hardest in The Devil Wears Prada 2 is the Nigel reveal.

The whole movie, you think Andy’s return to Runway happened through a combination of her reputation and luck. But at the end, we find out it was Nigel all along who set the whole thing in motion. He’s the one who sent the video of her post-firing/award acceptance speech to the chairman. He’s the one who saw her talent long before anyone else did and made sure it landed where it could do the most good. Nigel didn’t have to do that for Andy, but he did because that’s what real allies do.

This matters so much to me. I have had Nigels in my life. I have had people in professional settings who saw something in me before I fully saw it in myself and used their position to make sure I had room to grow. At 21Ninety, I had that, and I don’t take lightly for a single second how rare and precious that is, especially as a Black woman in this industry.

But Nigel only works because he remained. He stayed in the building. He held the institutional knowledge, the relationships, the trust. When the institutions themselves are hollowed out, when there is no Runway to fight for, where does that allyship live? Who holds the door open when the door doesn’t exist anymore?

That’s the real crisis. Not just the layoffs as individual events, but the loss of the ecosystems that made growth possible. The muscle memory of knowing how to tell a particular community’s stories well. The institutional commitment to a specific audience. Once those are gone, rebuilding them from scratch is damn near impossible.

You Don’t Need a Fashion House

Near the end of the film, Andy looks at Emily, who spent years believing her worth was tied to the institution she was attached to, and says something to her that felt like she was speaking directly to Zayna.

“You don’t need a fashion house,” she said. “You are iconic.”

I sat with that for a long time, and I’m glad this was part of the resolve portion of the movie.

The truth is that the industry is unstable. The platforms will shift. The relevancy of certain topics will change. The buildings will close (and sometimes they’ll close by text message while you’re at your own awards ceremony). That is the reality of media in 2026, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of lie.

But the stories don’t stop being necessary just because the outlet closes. Your voice doesn’t stop mattering just because the platform pivots. The audience, our audience, the Black women who have been reading and watching and listening and telling me “that article was exactly what I needed,” they are still here. They still need to be seen. They still deserve journalism that takes them seriously, that asks the hard questions about their lives, that doesn’t water down their complexity for the sake of a broader appeal.

I am not stopping. I’m just changing the packaging.

This Substack is the beginning of me reclaiming my voice. More creating, more talking, more sharing, more rooted in the realities of Black womanhood in all its fullness and nuance. The girl who covered Black womanhood at 21Ninety grew into a woman who is those stories. That doesn’t stop and that can’t be laid off.

Welcome to the stream of my consciousness.